One of my first portraits

Xandertures

I am very happy with the clarity and colors/white balance. I shot this in RAW and did some cleaning up in Elements 5.0. As happy as I am with it, today really makes me realize how much I need a backdrop and some real lighting.

Shot with my D50/50mm f/1.4 and SB-800 on camera bounced.
f/4.0
1/60
ISO 200

cmason

I am by no means an expert, but learned very quickly the impact of getting the lighting correct, and more importantly, where I want it. In your case, it needs to be off her chest, and onto her face. Simplest fix: go to buy a piece of white foam core ($0.89 at Michael's), and use that to refect the light onto her face.

Secondly, an important factor in portaits is getting the focus on the eyes. To me it appears you are front-focused on her, the eyes are not sharp. I would suggest lining up the focus pt directly on her eyes.

Xandertures

I appreciate the constructive criticism. I am currently doing research on studio lighting, mainly a nice softbox setup. I also am limited some what do to the D50 not having a wireless flash commander built in like the newer Nikon's.. otherwise I would have shot with the flash off camera which would have allowed me to have better directional control over the lighting. Your idea does sound great for a cheap fix until I get a transmitter and another light though.

And I have been having what I think are some focus issues with my camera ( and all of my lenses). Focus never seems to be that sharp on what the camera says it's main focal point is. I have it set to use the 5 setable focal points and have it set to lock at half shutter. However lately it always seems to be just a bit off.

~Jan~

I have focus issues sometimes, too. That is so annoying! For portraits, especially, if you don't get the focus dead-on the eyes it really runs them. Are you using the center focus point? Are you doing the focus-recompose method? (which often doesn't work)

Nice shot, with some minor changes that others mentioned it would be a real winner!

Scott_Quier

Some thoughts:

• Your model is lovely, I love the character/personality shown in her expression
• Raise her chin a bit, this will smooth out her neck some
• Raising her eye brow as she has induces a lot of forehead wrinkles. Might want to smooth those out a bit in PP. Not too much though - want to keep it natural.
• If your D50 has the ability, you might want to select the focus point to be used for focusing and place that over the near eye and shoot. As suggested, you don't want to focus and re-compose. Compose, then focus, then expose.

Xandertures wrote:

I appreciate the constructive criticism. I am currently doing research on studio lighting, mainly a nice softbox setup.

If you haven't already, check out Alien Bee lights (here). They are not the best on the market, but they are good and fairly priced. I have four AB800 strobes and am completely happy with them.

Xandertures

I'll give those tips a try, thanks!

And the Bee's are definitely very high on my list of off camera lighting purchases